The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget’s Thesaurus by Joshua Kendall.

I thought this biography of the author of Roget’s Thesaurus was full of interesting information interspersed between the author’s attempts to psychoanalyze Roget and all of his family members. He states lots of assumptions about Roget’s life as facts but then gives little or no evidence that those things are true. I liked the book because I learned a lot about Peter Mark Roget, but I often didn’t know what to trust.

For instance, the author states that Roget was self-centered and oblivious to the feelings and needs of others. Then he gives examples of how attentive and loving Roget was with his wife, Mary. I didn’t know what to think. Kendall states that Roget had an illicit sexual relationship with his daughter’s governess for many years after his wife’s death and that his family tried to hide this relationship, but he never says how he knows this to be so nor does he tell us why Roget, a religious man, would not have married the woman who was said to be his mistress. Maybe it’s all so, but I have questions.

I did like learning about how Roget influenced the development of the slide rule and how he loved the invention of his friend, the kaleidoscope. And I was amazed by the description of Roget’s discoveries in the science of optics, discoveries which led directly to the development of motion pictures about a century later. I enjoyed the story of how Roget as a young man escaped from Switzerland and the French authorities there when the Napoleonic Wars were heating up in 1803. I was sad to read about all the instances of mental distress and illness in Roget’s family and about his beloved uncle’s suicide. Altogether, I’m glad I read the book.

But I returned to Jen Bryant’s The Right Word: Roget and His Thesaurus after reading this adult biography, and I had a new appreciation for Bryant’s skill in distilling the essence of Roget’s life and accomplishments into a picture book. If you want a very brief introduction to Roget’s life, I suggest Bryant’s book. If you then want to know more, you can check out this biography or one of the others I found when I searched.

Peter Mark Roget: The Man Who Became a Book by Nick Rennison.

Peter Mark Roget: The Word and the Man by D.L. Emblen.

I did enjoy this quote from Kendall’s book that encapsulates Roget’s response to Darwin’s then-new theories about the origins of life and the purposes of natural history:

“In his ensuing discussion of plants and animals of every strip that comprised the remainder of the first volume (Bridgewater Treatise), Roget proceeded from the assumption that God has designed all their features in an ingenious way. Roget conceived of God as an artist; and his job as a natural historian was to discover and reveal the order in the work of art known as the universe.”

God the artist, indeed. Roget and I would agree on that assumption.

January 1: Ring Out Wild Bells by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, from In Memoriam. On Close Reads, The Daily Poem.

January 2: When the Year Grows Old by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Listen on the Daily Poem podcast.

January 3: For Tolkien’s Birthday, A Walking Song by JRR Tolkien.

January 4: January by Folgore da San Geminiano, translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. This poem is a sonnet, originally written in Italian.

January 5: Great Is Thy Faithfulness by Thomas Chisholm.

January 6: Epiphany. Prayer to the Three Kings by Evelyn Waugh. We do need to pray for those who are “the learned, the oblique and the delicate”. It’s so hard for the rich man, rich in his own wisdom or money, to enter the kingdom of heaven.

January 7: Twelfth Night by Phyllis McGinley.

January 8: When Icicles Hang by the Wall by William Shakespeare, from Love’s Labor’s Lost, Act V, Scene 2.

January 9: At the Round Earth’s Imagin’d Corners by John Donne.

January 10: Monday by Billy Collins. I actually found this poem on the Facebook page for the Literary Life podcast, a podcast that I enjoy very much, hosted by Angelina Standford and Cindy Rollins. If you’re on Facebook or if you listen to podcasts, I recommend The Literary Life, the page and the podcast.

January 13: The House Was Quiet and The World Was Calm by Wallace Stevens. I found this poem in the book I’m reading currently, The Shallows by Nicholas Carr.

January 14: A Garden by the Sea by William Morris.

January 15: California Winter by Karl Shapiro. I like the way this poem looks at California in the winter and compares/contrasts/places it within the world and the history of the world.

January 16: The Musical Instrument by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

January 17: So We’ll Go No More A’Roving by Lord Byron.

January 18:

January 19:

January 20:

January 21: Sympathy by Paul Laurence Dunbar.

January 22: There Will Come Soft Rains by Sara Teasdale.

January 23: Snowflakes by William Wadsworth Longfellow

January 24: Month of January by Hilaire Belloc.

January 25:

January 26: Winter: My Secret by Christina Rossetti.

January 27:

January 28:

January 29: Meeting at Night by Robert Browning.

January 30

January 31:

I have a fair number of poems already chosen for my “Poem a Day” for the month of January, but I’m also open to suggestions for the rest of the days of the month. If you have a favorite or suggested poem for me to read, please leave a comment.

My Dear Hamilton by Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie. Recommended at Reading Ladies Book Club.

The Kennedy Debutante by Kerri Maher and Kick: The True Story of JFK’s Sister and the Heir to Chatsworth by Paula Byrne. Both recommended at The Paperbag Princess.

The Vanished Bride by Bella Ellis. Recommended at BooksPlease.

Tear Down This Wall: A City, A President, and the Speech that Ended the Cold War by Romesh Ratnesar. Recommended at An Adventure in Reading.

Separated By The Border: A Birth Mother, A Foster Mother, And A Migrant Child’s 3,000-Mile Journey by Gena Thomas. I heard about this book on NPR.

Adorning the Dark by Andrew Peterson. Andrew Peterson’s new book about art, worship, and creativity.

The Less People Know About Us by Axton Betz-Hamilton. Recommended at Real Simple: Best Books of 2019.

The Dearly Beloved by Cara Wall. Recommended at Real Simple: Best Books of 2019.

Ladysitting by Lorene Cary. Recommended at Real Simple: Best Books of 2019.

God in the Rainforest by Kathryn T. Long. Recommended at Patheos, Anxious Bench.

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou.

I finished reading this book about Elizabeth Holmes and her ill-fated start-up company, Theranos, last night, and I also watched the documentary, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley. The entire story of an entrepreneur turned liar and crook got me to thinking about lies.

We constantly tell ourselves stories. Some of these stories we repeat to other people. We don’t usually tell others the stories that put us in a bad light (confession)—even though the Bible tells us to “confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another.” Maybe that’s because we often aren’t honest with ourselves to begin with, not about the sin and failure and mess in our lives. No, we like to tell ourselves good stories.

I tell myself in regard to lies that a little exaggeration, a little rearranging of events and actions, won’t hurt anyone, and it will smooth the way, make things more understandable, less messy. After all, one can be too scrupulous. And everyone else does it, too. This is exactly what I think Elizabeth Holmes told herself at first. All of the businessmen (most of them are men) in Silicon Valley exaggerate and fudge numbers and build up their expectations of success in order to appeal to investors. Holmes told herself she was just playing the game by the same rules as everyone else.

But then, slowly over time, the little lies and exaggerations become big lies and exaggerations. And if I’m not careful, if we’re not careful, we begin to believe our own lies. Elizabeth Holmes believed that she was creating a new technology that would revolutionize health care; she told herself and then others that this technology would work, that it had to work, that if only she could get enough investment funds to gain enough time to make her ideas into reality, she could change the world. After all, isn’t that what entrepreneurs do: sell an idea that hasn’t yet come to fruition. And if she had to fudge, even lie and deceive, to keep the investors happy and keep the money rolling in, then it wasn’t really lying. It was casting a vision, creative storytelling.

Until it all came crashing down. Holmes’s technology of blood testing using just a finger prick drop of blood wasn’t near realization. It wasn’t even close to being a reality, if it could be done at all. But Elizabeth Holmes was so invested in her story that she ignored the problems and the caution lights and just kept right on forging ahead. If she had to lie and deceive some people to keep on realizing her dream, well, then, that was the price she had to pay. And how dare anyone try to stand in her way? Elizabeth Holmes was the heroine of this story!

Oh, Lord, help me to be careful about the stories I tell myself and the stories I tell to others. I am often the heroine of my own story, and I am prone to believe a lie, to become caught up in my own story, to ignore the warnings and the issues and the messes that I am busily leaving in my wake. Lord, give us eyes to see, and grace to repent, and tongues to tell the truth. Kyrie eleison.

I would like to spend the month of January reading books from the years 1900-1909, either books published in 1900-1909 or books set in that decade.

Classic children’s books published in 1900-1910:

Already read: The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum (1900); Five Children and It by E. Nesbit (1902); The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter (1902); The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin by Beatrix Potter (1903); Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin (1903); A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett(1905); The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908).

The Adventures of a Brownie by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik (1900). I do think this little book can go on my reading list for the month.

Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling (1902). Maybe this one, too.

Why the Chimes Rang and Other Stories by Raymond Macdonald Alden. I’ve read Why the Chimes Rang, and enjoyed it as a sweet Christmas story, but I haven’t read the “other stories.”

Fiction Bestsellers, 1900-1910:

I’ve read: Unleavened Bread by Robert Grant (1900), Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900), Janice Meredith by Paul L. Ford (1900), The Hound of the Baskervilles by A. Conan Doyle, House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (1905); The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (1906).

I’d like to add to my reading: A Room with a View by E.M. Forster (1908) and The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903). The latter book has a movie coming out soon with Harrison Ford as the main character.

Some other books published in the first decade of the twentieth century that I’d like to read:

Diary from Dixie by Mary Chesnut.

Jerusalem by Selma Lagerlof (1902). Selma Lagerlof, first woman author to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1909, wrote this story of a group of Swedish families who set up a Christian colony in Jerusalem. It would count for the Reshelving Alexandria reading challenge to read a book in translation.

Some books set in the years 1900-1910 that I would like to read:

Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War by Robert Massie.

The Greatest Adventure: A Story of Jack London by Frederick A. Lane. I have this book in my library.

The Outlander by Gil Adamson. Idaho and Montana, 1903. A nineteen year old woman murders her abusive husband and then runs away from his brothers who are thirsty for revenge.

Abel’s Island by William Steig. (1907 setting?) I also have this one in my library.

Also I should add some famous and popular poets of the decade to my “poem a day” project: Rudyard Kipling, Robert Service, W.B. Yeats, Thomas Hardy, A.E. Houseman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sara Teasdale, Anna Akhmatova.

If you want to read more posts about books and other news and arts from the years 1900-1909:

1900. 1901. 1902. 1903. 1904. 1905. 1906. 1907. 1908. 1909.

That should be enough for January, especially since I also have some reading plans that are not related to the 1900-1909 decade. Happy reading, everyone, wherever and whenever you are doing it.

I plan to read a poem a day this year, aloud. I always told my students that poetry was meant to be read out loud. And in reference to the poem by Tennyson that I chose for the first day of 2020, I told someone yesterday morning that the actual date may be arbitrary, but human beings need a reset date, a time to start over and think and examine our lives and begin again. It’s that time of year, a time to start anew, to throw out the things that are not working or that are slowly dying.

I put some covers of books I suggest for celebrating the new year down the side of this post. Enjoy.

“Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.”

?Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Bleak House by Charles Dickens. I have a goal of reading one books that I haven’t already read by Dickens each year until I’ve read all of his novels. I’ve already read Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby, Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and now, Bleak House. Any suggestions for a Dickens novel for 2020?

The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner. I actually read several of the books in Turner’s Queen’s Thief series this year and enjoyed them all. The first time I read The Thief, I wasn’t that impressed, but this time I really dived into the series headfirst and found it fascinating in its treatment of personality, relationship, and political intrigue.

Great Northern? A Scottish Adventure of Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome. I highly recommend the Swallows and Amazons series. I also read We Didn’t Mean To Go To Sea this year and it was just as good as the others in the series. I just have one or two more Swallows and Amazons books to read, and then I’ll have to throw a party or something Finishing the series seems to require a party or something.

Forward Me Back to You by Mitali Perkins. Great YA fiction, published in 2019.

A Lantern in Her Hand by Bess Streeter Aldrich. I just finished this family saga/woman’s life story novel a week or so before Christmas, and I loved it it. I want to read more books by this author.

Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers. This was a re-read along with the Literary Life Podcast with Angelina Stanford and Cindy Rollins, and I enjoyed it just as much as I did the first time I read it.

Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton. This was also a re-read for me, this time in conjunction with my in-person book club that just started this fall. Such a good, but heart-rending story.

The Iron Lily by Barbara Willard. I enjoyed reading all of the Mantlemass Chronicles by Willard this year, but this one may have been my favorite.

The Friendship War by Andrew Clements. Deceptively simple story about a button-collecting fad that reveals a lot about character and friendship in a group of elementary age children. Mr. Clements died late this year, after having published a number of solidly entertaining middle grade fiction titles over the course of his career. His most well-known book is probably Frindle, about a class of fifth graders who make up a new word and campaign to have it accepted into the language.

A Dawn in the Trees: The Thomas Jefferson Years, 1776-1789 by Leonard Wibberley. This book, too, was a part of a series of mildly fictionalized biographical novels about our illustrious third president. I like Jefferson better in fiction than in fact. I did enjoy these books about the story of Jefferson’s life.

What are the best fiction books you’ve read this year? What fiction are you looking forward to reading in 2020?

American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road by Nick Bilton.

The Kings of Big Spring: God, Oil, and One Family’s Search for the American Dream by Bryan Mealer.

Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court by Mollie Hemingway.

The Doctor Who Saved Babies: Ignaz Phillipp Semmelweis by Josephine Rich.

Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened By the Moon by Leonard S. Marcus.

On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books by Karen Swallow Prior.

The Discoverer of Insulin: Dr. Frederick Banting by I.E. Levine.

How the Heather Looks: A Joyous Journey to the British Sources of Children’s Books by Joan Bodger.

Forty Autumns: A Family’s Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall by Nina Wilner.

Book Girl: A Journey Through the Treasures and Transforming Power of a Reading Life by Sarah Clarkson. I did several posts here on Semicolon in response to this book, including Reading Mentors, Book Empathy, Books of Faith, Books That Shaped Me, Reading in Fellowship, Reading Slump, Gifts of Reading, and How to Choose Books.

Sun King: Louis XIV of France by Alfred Apsler.

Young Man in a Hurry: The Story of Cyrus W. Field by Jean Lee Latham.

Good, but not quite top-notch:

Our Castle by the Sea by Lucy Strange. Pet lives in a lighthouse on the southeast coast of England just as World War II is beginning to sow mistrust and division amongst the community where she lives. For WW2 buffs and spy novel enthusiasts.

The Good Thieves by Katherine Rundell. An Irish friend recommended Rundell to me, and although I enjoyed the book, I don’t think it will stick in my memory. Vita’s grandfather has had his crumbling mansion stolen by the fraud of a powerful New York City real estate magnate. Vita and her new friends set out to take the mansion back and go through all sorts of dangers to do so. Set in the 1920’s. (Both Vita, the character, and Ms. Rundell hail from Great Britain.)

Spark by Sarah Beth Durst. When shy, quiet, and gentle Mina bonds with a lightning beast named Pixit, everyone is sure there has been a mistake, including Mina herself. How can the nearly silent farm girl master the skills of a lightning guardian and learn to speak out and be heard? At first, I liked this one a lot, but the lightning finally kind of fizzled into a moralistic tale about “finding one’s own voice.”

All the Ways Home by Elsie Chapman. Kaede Hirano’s mom died in a car accident, and Kaede has spent his seventh grade year taking his grief and anger out on everyone around him. Now he must go to Japan to stay for a few weeks with the father who hasn’t communicated with him or his mom in years and the older stepbrother who is also a mystery. The parts about Japan and how life there is different were interesting, but ultimately Kaede was just too angsty and angry and impulsively self-destructive to gain my sympathy. I felt sorry for him, but I also wanted to shake some sense into the boy. Frustrating.

The Becket List: A Blackberry Farm Story by Adele Griffin. O.K., but kind of silly. Rebecca, aka Becket, and her family move from the city to the country, and Becket enthusiastically sets out to learn to be a country kid. Becket is ten years old going on seven, and her attempts to live the country life and make friends are somewhat clumsy. But lovable.

Malamander by Thomas Taylor. Eerie-on-the-Sea is a mysterious place, and Herbert Lemon, the Lost-and-Founder at the Grand Nautilus Hotel, is the guy who tries to keep things in order. But when Violet Parma turns up looking for her lost parents, Herbert’s life becomes a series of dangerous adventures. The plot was sort of convoluted, but I guess it made sense in a way? The ride was fun, but I’m not so sure about the ending.

Rising above Shepherdsville by Anne Schoenbohm. Dulcie has been unable to speak since the recent death of her mother. Her step-father can’t care for her anymore. So Dulcie ends up in Shepherdsville with her church-going, very religious, estranged Aunt Bernie. I liked the spiritual dimension this story, quite respectful to Christians and evangelical Christianity, but some of the details felt wrong to me. Do any churches really have a “baptism Sunday” and arrange to baptize someone who has made no real profession of faith? Some of this story just felt “off”, and the turn around that Dulcie’s step-father makes toward the end of the book strained credulity. I didn’t trust him.

Bad and/or Ugly:

Spy Runner by Eugene Yelchin. This one wasn’t exactly bad, but it was confusing and sort of grey-ish. The setting is the 1953, the red scare, and everyone thinks everyone else is a Commie spy. Except for some of them who don’t believe that anyone could be a Commie spy. And the characters run around town making weird and unexplained decisions. Too much chase and not enough answers.

The Misadventured Summer of Tumbleweed Thompson by Glenn McCarty. I wanted to like this middle grade Western by a Christian author, but it just fell flat for me. And it could have used a bit more editing for grammar and typos. Too bad. A Tom Sawyer-type adventure story like this one would be just the thing for some of the readers who frequent my library.

Extraordinary Birds by Sandy Stark McGinnis. A girl named December (lovely name) thinks she is going to become a bird or is really a bird as a result of child abuse and trauma in her past. December’s new friend, Cheryllynn, thinks he is a girl, maybe also because of past child abuse and trauma? December figures out that she is deluded, but Cheryllynn remains “true to herself.” What a confusing and deceitful message.

We, Engineer Husband and I and three of our own little women, went to see the new movie adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women at the movie theater the day after Christmas. Engineer Husband, who is a very tender and sometimes emotional man but is never moved to tears, said the movie almost made him cry. That’s a powerful recommendation, if that’s the purpose of art, to appeal to the emotions.

 I could pick at this 2019 movie version of Alcott’s famous novel: the actress who played Amy was too old to be the young Amy although she made a valiant effort, and Laurie was too boyish and reserved and never really arrived at lovable or endearing. I thought one throwaway line in the movie was a particularly egregious case of pandering to progressive sensibilities and preoccupations. (I won’t say which line because I don’t want to draw attention to it or argue about it.) The downplaying, or over-dramatization, of Jo’s and Frederick’s romance at the end was bothersome. Was it real or was it just a chapter in Jo’s book? Was it unbelievable (the meeting under the umbrella) because it was basically untrue, not true to Jo’s character, or because it was untrue for Louisa Alcott? The blending of fact about Louisa May Alcott’s life and fiction about the March family was unnerving and distracting at this particular point in the movie.

Nevertheless, I thought it was a very good movie. It did make me re-think Little Women, as Karen Swallow Prior suggested in her review. It was a Little Women for our time, a bit ambiguous as to Jo’s actual fate, very meta-, sometimes confusing with all of the time jumps back and forth, but still true to the author’s intent, I believe, and with some sound truths to mull over.

Sound truth number #1: Marriage can be, and often has been for much of history, a mercenary affair. Jo says as much in the movie, and Aunt March preaches it. And little Amy, of all people, puts the entire concept into a blunt and truthful paragraph:

“I’m just a woman. And as a woman, there’s no way for me to make my own money. Not enough to earn a living or to support my family, and if I had my own money, which I don’t, that money would belong to my husband the moment we got married. And if we had children, they would be his, not mine. They would be his property, so don’t sit there and tell me that marriage isn’t an economic proposition, because it is. It may not be for you, but it most certainly is for me.“

Little Women, Amy March to Laurie

In some ways the economic aspect of marriage has changed. Nowadays women don’t worry about marrying for money as much as they did. And there are plenty of ways for a woman to make her own way, economically speaking, in the world. But women do worry about divorce and being forced to support their children by themselves, and they do hesitate to get married or to have children in the first place because of the responsibility that may fall upon the woman’s shoulders. Women have abortions, killing their own children, for many reasons, but often because they don’t see any way to support a child financially. And the father doesn’t consider the children to be his property or even his responsibility. So if marriage is not an economic proposition, it certainly entails economic considerations.

Sound truth #2: Jo says: “Women, they have minds, and they have souls, as well as just hearts. And they’ve got ambition, and they’ve got talent, as well as just beauty. I’m so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for. I’m so sick of it!”

But Meg chooses marriage and domesticity, telling Jo, “Just because my dreams are different than yours, it doesn’t mean they’re unimportant.” Both girls demonstrate that it’s not love that is all a woman is fit for. She’s also fit to be a full partner in marriage like Meg or to be independent like Jo or to marry for love and be the strong moral force within the marriage, as Amy does and is with Laurie.

These are just some of thoughts I had in response to the movie. I’d be curious to hear what you thought if you have seen it. All of the many versions and remakes of Alcott’s story add a little something to a classic story that has certainly stood the test of time and has given us all something to enjoy and think about over many years.

How “Little Women” Re-Reads the Original Novel by Karen Swallow Prior.

Greta Gerwig’s Raw, Startling “Little Women” by Anthony Lane in The New Yorker.

“Little Women” Is a Masterpiece by Tyler Huckabee in Relevant magazine.